"We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death..."--Martin Gardner

Monday, May 3, 2010

Mis(s) Feiring

What am I looking for in wine?

I'm looking for the Gertrude Steins, the k.d. langs, the Dizzy Deans. Wines that have a nasty screwball. Which I can relate to. I want my wines natural. Think pubic hair. Think armpits. Makeup is OK, only a little, but no animals tortured. Unless they're my critics who don't get it. I write only for me, about wines for me. But I'm driving a bandwagon. Under the influence, but a bandwagon nonetheless, and I want everyone to be on it. Except Parker. He'd have to sit on the left side and everyone else would have to sit on the right. Balance. Like wines. I seek balance. Think tightrope walker. No balance, they're dead. Naturally. So I'm a wine cop. With no authority. Except my own. I'll write you a nasty ticket if you make wines that aren't natural. I'll throw the book at you. My book. I wrote a book. You have it. It changed you. It changed everyone. I'm a wine messiah. Follow me. I know people. I'll mention all of them. Most are famous. Others should be. Who cares? I'm famous, I'm a wine cop, I'm a messiah. I'm so lonely.

Posts

I was asked to speak at a seminar. I'm the leading authority on Natural Wines. No. Make that I'm the Only Authority on Natural Wines. I'm asked to speak often. I changed the world. Like Gandhi. Like Martin Luther King. Like the Exxon Valdez. The only disasters I like are natural too. Earthquakes. Tsunami. Gamay.

I don't like giving speeches. I like giving commandments. Thou shalt not sulfur. I remember Jesus said, "Sulfur little children..." That was wrong too. Where was I?

In a room, issuing commandments, signing books. Michel Bettane was there, he's a wine critic also. He's French. I like the French, they're so natural. He had nose hair like a wire brush. I wrapped my fingers in it. He asked me to sign my book for him. My book. You have it, I know, it changed everything. I was happy to sign Bettane's book but the pen was filled with synthetic ink. Not ink from an octopus or a squid or pasta. I could not sully the book. I pricked my finger and signed in blood. It felt good. Natural. I thought of Carole King. Maybe it was Bettane's nose hair that reminded me of her hair. Jewish hair. Natural hair. "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman!"

I probably shouldn't have sung it out loud.

I signed the book, With Love, Alice. Bettane smiled. I'm so lonely.

Others were there too. Mostly famous people to hear me. Maybe not famous to you. Not yet. But famous to me, and I assign fame only for myself. To myself. I'm a fame cop. Always copping the famous. Many great winemakers were there. Did I mention this speech was in France? I love France. I surrender to the French. No one's ever done that before. Usually the other way around.

I hope that doesn't offend my French friends. But I speak the truth. Someone has to. The wine world is filled with liars and cheats, and, well, then your wine is filled with lies and cheats. Is that what you want in your stool? Shit, I said stool.

Yet another lie. Another commandment. Thou shalt only use wild yeast. I almost typed wild Yeats. He was a poet. And a good one. He was at my speech. But he's dead. Ironic. He often wrote of the dead. I signed a book for him too. "To Bill" I wrote "you were far too cultured for my taste."

No wine can be natural if it wasn't fermented by wild yeast. Though yeast all over the world has been infiltrated by cultured strains and there is no more wild yeast. I don't care. I have my standards, my commandments. Pick out the cultured strains like they pick out illegal aliens in Arizona. It can be done. I can tell when I taste. I know when a wine was done with cultured yeast. It speaks to me. In an English accent. I hate the English. The accent is fake, like my writing style. The wines taste fake. You just know. You do. Ask anybody who agrees with me.

Francois Ghitaine was there at my speech from Domaine Hornswaggle. His wines are natural. When I visited Francois he proudly showed me his cement vats for fermenting. Cement vats are making a comeback. Why? They are better for the wine. There is concrete evidence. Get it? Concrete evidence! Funnier in French. Francois even goes so far as to ferment the wine in the vats before the cement has even set. The flavors of the ground, the rocks, are in his wines. His Petit Manseng is wet cement in a glass. It's perfect. I took a finger and wrote my name in it. "Alice" I'm so lonely.

I was last at Hornswaggle when only Francois' wife was there, Brigitte. She cooked for me while I spoke to her in short sentences. Very short. I asked her about their biodynamic lifestyle. She was blunt. Francois is a pig. She told him to bury his damned man horns in the vineyard stuffed with the manure he'd brought into their lives. I spoke more short sentences to her. She cooked. Eggs, from a virgin chicken. Over easy. Just how I wanted them. And her. She left weeping. The eggs were runny, like her nose. But the wines are brilliant. I'm brilliant.

Ms. Feiring was harder to do than Saramago. She reads very much like she's been poorly translated from a foreign language. I spent maybe 45 minutes reading her blog and was strongly struck by what I perceived as a messianic streak tempered by some sort of massive insecurity. That, and her strange writing style, is what I tried to convey.

Marcia Love, I knew that if I went after her viciously it would read more like cruelty than fun. So I intentionally pulled the meanest punches. I always aim only to make folks laugh, take down the mighty a notch. But cringing, Charlie, is also the response I'm after.

No, I have not read her book, even though I like fiction. I know absolutely nothing about her past. Strangely, when I was about finished writing that first introductory paragraph the evil little HoseMaster in my head typed those four words. I had not planned them. But, honestly, I think that loneliness, if indeed it is loneliness, is the subtext of a lot of her writing.

But, really, I just wanted it to be satirical. So who do I lampoon next?

RonYou know I love you. But, this post bothers me. I have spent more time thinking about it than most of the posts I write--though, given their quality, that might be obvious.

I think the reason this post makes me cringe rather than laugh is that it comes off as more of a personal attack on Alice. Alice is a friend and I am not particularly troubled by criticisms on her work. If I had trouble with negative reviews, I would need to look for another type of employment.

But stating that you had not read her work and then adding the "lonely" comment takes this from parody to personal and it just strikes me as unnecessary and a bit mean.

End of lecture now. Back to whining about author I have worked with for several years who continues to introduce himself as meetings as though we have never met and sends emails to other departments asking what my name is.

Would that be insulting to Gary V. or Garcia Marquez? Rhetorical question.

Amy Darling,

I love you too. You know that, I hope.

I'm glad you expressed your thoughts here, and, more than that, I'm really glad my post made you spend a lot of time thinking. I take that as flattery.

Satire cannot have any boundaries. Period. I felt, after reading through a bunch of her blog posts, that what drives an awful lot of Alice's work is this subtext of loneliness--it was just a hunch, based only on reading her words. It's not a personal attack on her. I have never met her and know absolutely nothing about her personally. And how did loneliness become a character fault? It's simply the human condition. Alice uses it in her work. I did too.

A cringe is the response I wanted. That feeling of needing to look away when you see a terrible accident. Only you can't. It was the feeling I took from her blog.

I'd only spend this much time "explaining" myself to someone like you, Amy, someone I adore. Otherwise, the work stands, or falls, on its own.

John,

I'll never be a famous writer either. It's why we blog, right? To be famous in a tiny little way, among eight or nine people.

The fact that we cringed at this post does not make it illegitimate. It does mean that we knew how close it was coming to the bone, and in a personal way. I have told Ron both here and privately, that this was one of his greatest pieces ever in my opinion. Not because it may have been hurtful at some level, but because it rang so damn true that it made me cringe for Alice--who, by the way, may or may not cringe on her own.

Amy (ABC) suggested that there was a mean edge to the piece, and perhaps there is (again, why cringe if there was not), but Ron has written tougher stuff, more accusatory stuff before. It is part of the territory. Really good, biting satire does that.

My wife and I saw a play in SF recently called VIGIL about a nephew who comes to care for an ailing aunt who is about to die. She does not die and the despair that causes him is treated in an amazingly humorous way. You know, as you laugh, that this is black humor. You know as you laugh that you too will feel the same thing when you get to care for an elderly person of diminishing capacity. You know as you laugh that you should not. But you do because the playwright has found the right voice, the right cadence to capture the irony. So you laugh at the prospect of death.

Humor is not always neat. It is not always kind. Sometimes you just have to cringe while you laugh. Great satire digs deep.

I made it halfway thru her book before the cringing overtook my intention to see where (if anywhere) it was going. You nailed it, but could have gone further. Where is the whining about the sub-par accommodations? The dicey weather? The cold caves? The dismissal of all corporate wines as garbage, while happily chowing down at the corporate troughs? Onward HMW, and if necessary, I'll take my hit if it comes.

How can satire not be personal? It is funny that there was very little stir when I lampooned Alder. Satire is always funnier when you think the subject deserves it. When the subject is someone you like it's suddenly mean and unfunny. I've heard this my entire writing life. And I'm far from a great satirist, I'm simply having fun and trying to make folks laugh. Though cringeing has its place.

Paul,

Thanks for the support. As I said, I haven't read Ms. Feiring's book. I lampooned her blog, not her book.

Somehow this debate is about being mean. Why? The wine world is not immune to comedy or criticism, I don't care who it is. Should I?

Yes, do Gary V. I learned of him through my godson/nephew (25ish) whom we have been bringing along the twisting, turning wine road. The Vchucker really seems to resonate with the younger demographic (is Vaynerchuk Ruski for vomit?). Regardless, he provided some links to the V's spewing, including the one about eating dirt, tile grout mold, and old bandages from sucking chest wounds to help develop one's palate, and asked for my honest opinion. Not wanting to put the lad off on further exploration, I diplomatically said that the V also resonates with me, but did not add my comparison of him to a stack of 500W Marshalls with cracks in the bass speakers, tweeters gone terribly bad, and a sound man on a cocktail of meth, ecstasy and bad gin. Hmmm, this may explain my aversion to Twitter.

Light the barbie and dig out the skewers. Satire has no requirement to be pretty.

You'd think by now I'd know better than to start talking the nuts and bolts of satire in the comments section. I've said it a thousand times, if you're writing satire and not pissing somebody off, you're not doing it right. And, you're right, we've effectively talked this subject to death.

The good news about wine blogging is that two days after you post, no one cares. It's just another post in the archive that no one will read.

Dave,

I've only watched a Gary V. post once, and have no desire to watch him again. He's not a blogger, he's a huckster. That's why he's making money. A written parody of a guy who is a "personality" (much like American Idol features "talent") wouldn't work. Plus, in order to lampoon him I'd have to watch a bunch of episodes, and, frankly, I'd rather spend the weekend being waterboarded.

Wow, you brought out the Feiring squad and hosed Alice down real good. Based on her reaction to a few comments on my blog re: she thinks all CA wine is gooey carp, I don't think she'd be amused by this. It's too spot on . . . .

I think you need a little Gruner V boarding in the form of some Gary V watching. Bet you've never heard sheep's butt and bouquet used in the same sentence . . . .

Can't blame you for not wanting to go after the vayne one, and agree with Mr. Olken that it would be hard to do satire of a such a cartoonish figure. Leave the hucksterchuck lampoon to South Park, and keep on skewering your way...

Thanks. Every time I do a blog parody I get the most amazing and scary responses. That's why I keep doing them.

Vainroastchuck would be incredibly easy to do, so at this point I won't bother. His is self-parody and requires a very heavy and cruel hand. I can do that too, but don't feel compelled. And by the way, that kind of talk is VERY insulting to cartoon characters.

Quite entertaining... this post and the next one have been the highlights of my day, albeit for much different reasons. Goes to show you the broad range a person's psyche can span in a matter of minutes :)

Lyle Fass told me to read this today. He was right, it's a pisser. And you pulled many a punch, too.

Alice in person is completely different from the strident fundamentalist harridan she has created as a persona in her writing. And you're right, her literary style seems a bit like a translation from the Lithuanian at times.

You hit on that and the loneliness very accurately. For satire to succeed you have to hit the target right smack in the middle, and you did.

Thanks for the kind words. I did, indeed, pull punches, because there is a line a satirist can cross and the work becomes about simple nastiness and contempt, and I wanted it to be funny, not a bludgeoning.

I doubt I'll ever meet Ms. Feiring. All accounts say she is a lovely woman. I just parodied the person she portrays on her blog. As it happens, people also think from my work that I'm a jerk and probably very lonely. In that case, they're right.

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After 19 years as a Sommelier in Los Angeles, twice named Sommelier of the Year by the Southern California Restaurant Writers' Association, I moved to Sonoma County to explore the other aspects of the wine business. I've spent, OK wasted, 35 years learning about and teaching about and swallowing wine. I am also a judge at the Sonoma Harvest Fair, San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition and the San Francisco International Wine Competition--so I can spit like a rabid llama. I know more about wine than David Sedaris and I'm funnier than James Laube. Stay tuned for an informed but jaded view of everything wine and everything else.

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